James Carville is co-host of Crossfire, CNN's political debate program. Carville and co-host Paul Begala provide insight and commentary "from the left," as they square off against conservatives Robert Novak and Tucker Carlson. Crossfire's co-hosts debate the hottest issues of the day with the nation's top newsmakers and political figures. The show airs live from George Washington University's Jack Morton Auditorium in Washington, D.C.

Carville, an outspoken Democratic political strategist and commentator emerged onto the national political scene after his consulting firm, Carville & Begala, helped elect President Bill Clinton in 1992. For his work on the Clinton campaign, the American Association of Political Consultants named him Campaign Manager of the Year in 1993. He went on to serve as a senior political adviser to the president.

Carville & Begala's other well-known electoral successes include the 1991 Senate victory of Harris Wofford in Pennsylvania, the 1990 gubernatorial victories of Georgia's Zell Miller and Pennsylvania's Robert P. Casey and the 1998 re-election of Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. In 1997, Carville co-founded the international consulting firm of Gould Greenberg Carville NOP.

Often referred to as the "Ragin' Cajun" for his animated and colorful debating style, Carville began managing political campaigns in 1982. Before entering politics, he worked as a litigator at a Baton Rouge, La., law firm from 1973-1979 and also had brief stints in the U.S. Marines and as a high school teacher.

Carville co-authored the current best seller Buck Up, Suck Up... and Come Back When You Foul Up with Begala and has also authored We're Right, They're Wrong: A Handbook for Spirited Progressives, And the Horse he Rode in on: The People vs. Ken Starr, and 'Stickin- The Case for Loyalty. With his wife, renowned Republican strategist and current Bush Administration adviser Mary Matalin, he co-authored a book entitled, All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President. Matalin is a former conservative host of Crossfire (1999-2001).

Born and raised in Carville, La.-a town named for his grandfather-he graduated from Louisiana State University with undergraduate and law degrees.

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In asserting that "we found the weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, President George Bush has presented a far less expansive estimate of Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities than the one he used for months to justify the war.

Since last August Mr Bush and his top lieutenants said it was an absolute certainty that Iraq remained in possession of significant quantities of banned weapons, particularly chemical and biological munitions.

But Mr Bush's remarks on Thursday, in an interview on Polish television, made it clear the United States had lowered its standards of proof. Mr Bush said the discovery in Iraq of two trailers, with laboratory equipment but no pathogens, was tantamount to a discovery of weapons.

Mr Bush's original charges against Iraq, presented to the United Nations and the US public, were explicitly about the weapons themselves.

In his State of the Union address on January 28, he cited evidence that Saddam had enough materials to produce more than 38,000 litres of botulinum toxin and as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents.

"He has not accounted for these materials," Mr Bush said.

"He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them."

In delivering his March 17 ultimatum to Saddam to go into exile, Mr Bush said in a national address that Iraq possessed "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

As the war started, the US continued to say with total confidence that the weapons would be found.

On March 21 the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, said there was "no question" biological and chemical weapons would be found and said "this was the reason that the President felt so strongly that we needed to take military action".

General Tommy Franks, leading the invading military forces in Iraq, said the next day that there was "no doubt that the regime possesses weapons of mass destruction" and that they would be found.

On March 30 on US television, the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said of the prohibited weapons: "We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

However, when heavy combat in Iraq ended without any of the banned arms having been discovered, American officials began to put the emphasis on the search for evidence of weapons programs rather than on the weapons themselves.

On April 24 Mr Bush raised the possibility that the weapons might no longer exist.

"We know he had them," he said. "And whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we're going to find out the truth."

The Washington Post

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/02/1054406134772.html

Former Army secretary Thomas White said in an interview that senior Defense officials "are unwilling to come to grips" with the scale of the postwar U.S. obligation in Iraq. The Pentagon has about 150,000 troops in Iraq and recently announced that the Army's 3rd Infantry Division's stay there has been extended indefinitely.

"This is not what they were selling (before the war)," White said, describing how senior Defense officials downplayed the need for a large occupation force. "It's almost a question of people not wanting to 'fess up to the notion that we will be there a long time and they might have to set up a rotation and sustain it for the long term."

AP file White

The interview was White's first since leaving the Pentagon in May after a series of public feuds with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld led to his firing.

Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz criticized the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, after Shinseki told Congress in February that the occupation could require "several hundred thousand troops." Wolfowitz called Shinseki's estimate "wildly off the mark."

Rumsfeld was furious with White when the Army secretary agreed with Shinseki.

Last month, Rumsfeld said the United States would remain in Iraq as "long as it takes." But the Defense chief was not specific about the size of the force.

The Pentagon declined to respond to White's comments, but a senior official said it was too early to draw conclusions about the size or length of the U.S. troops' commitment in Iraq.

White said it is reasonable to assume the Pentagon will need more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq to provide stability for at least the next year. Pentagon officials envisioned having about 100,000 troops there immediately after the war, but they hoped that number would be quickly drawn down.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-06-02-white-usat_x.htm

Posted on Sat, May. 31, 2003 Iraq repercussions trouble top advisers RATIONALE FOR INVASION CHALLENGED By John Walcott Mercury News Washington Bureau WASHINGTON - Some of President Bush's top advisers, who had hoped the war in Iraq would be the turning point in the battle against terrorism and the centerpiece of the president's re-election campaign, fear it is instead becoming a political, diplomatic and military mess. ``The postwar period in Iraq is messy. We haven't found what we said we'd find there and there are unpleasant questions about assumptions we made and intelligence we had,'' said a senior national security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ``If many more months go by and our troops are still there, the Iraqis are still fighting each other and us, and we still haven't found any WMD'' -- weapons of mass destruction -- ``there will be hell to pay.'' The situation in Iraq could rebound quickly, especially if U.S. forces restore power, water, health care and other services; revive the nation's battered oil industry; and unite feuding Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis and tribes into some sort of civil authority. But for now, U.S. troops in Iraq are the targets of anger and ambushes instead of being greeted as liberators, as some Pentagon officials had expected. Eleven Americans died this week from enemy action and accidents, and some of their civilian leaders now privately admit that the relatively small force that quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi military is too small to restore order in a nation the size of California. Wasted month The U.S. attempt to hand the country over to an Iraqi civilian administration isn't faring much better, and Bush is expected to meet with L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian in Iraq, in Qatar on Wednesday to discuss overhauling the American administration in Baghdad for the second time in a month. A top U.S. official Friday said Bremer's predecessor, retired Army Gen. Jay Garner, had failed, adding: ``We lost a month because of Garner.'' Critics in Congress and some within the government now suspect that a third problem, potentially the most serious of all, helps to explain the unexpected difficulties. Much of the administration's public rationale for the war, and much of its planning for the war and its aftermath, these critics say, appears to have been based on fabricated or exaggerated intelligence that was fed to civilian officials in the Pentagon by Iraqi exiles eager for the United States to oust Saddam Hussein. The exiles, intelligence officials said, told Pentagon officials, among other things, that many Iraqi Shiites would welcome American troops as liberators, that some key Iraqi generals would surrender their units and that Saddam had sent a key operative to work with a small Islamist group, Ansar al-Islam, that had ties to Al-Qaida. Officials in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department all warned repeatedly that past experience with the exiles, led by Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, indicated that their intelligence was unreliable at best. But the intelligence information and Iraqi defectors supplied by the Iraqi National Congress were taken seriously in two important places: the New York Times and a special intelligence group set up by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. The Iraqi National Congress, U.S. intelligence officials said, bypassed skeptics in the CIA and DIA and fed the same information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaida to the Times and the Pentagon, so Pentagon officials would confirm what the nation's most influential newspaper was hearing and the newspaper would confirm what the Pentagon was hearing. An internal Times e-mail reported by the Washington Post said Chalabi ``has provided most of the front-page exclusives on WMD to our paper'' and added that a team of U.S. troops searching for chemical and biological weapons in Iraq was ``using Chalabi's intel [intelligence] and document network for its own WMD work.'' Doubts about the administration's assertions that Saddam had hidden stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and established ties to Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida terrorist organization have been growing almost daily since the war ended, as U.S. troops have failed to find either the weapons or ties to terrorism. The senior Marine general in Iraq said Friday that extensive searches had failed to locate any chemical weapons. ``It was a surprise to me then -- it remains a surprise to me now -- that we have not uncovered weapons,'' Lt. Gen. James Conway, the commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, told reporters at the Pentagon in a video teleconference. Intensive search ``Believe me, it's not for lack of trying. We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there,'' Conway said. Bush, however, told a Polish television network: ``We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories . . . and we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, we found them.'' CIA officials Wednesday said U.S. troops in Iraq had found two mobile laboratories that analysts concluded were intended to make biological weapons, but they said the labs contained no evidence that the Iraqis had actually produced such weapons. In an interview in the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a leading proponent of the war, cast some doubt on whether administration officials were convinced that Iraq had secret stocks of nerve gas and anthrax bacteria, or whether they merely seized on the issue as a way to build support for the war. ``The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason,'' Wolfowitz said, according to a text released by the Pentagon. Another senior official, who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity, said Wolfowitz's remark was accurate: CIA and State Department analysts, he said, sharply disputed the Pentagon's claim that Saddam had forged links to Al-Qaida, but everyone agreed that Iraq probably had not destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons. However, the official said Wolfowitz's ``choice of words, if it's being reported accurately, is probably one that Paul now regrets.'' Another top official, who also agreed to speak only without attribution because, he said, ``talking out of school is frowned upon at the White House,'' said White House political director Karl Rove and other officials were displeased by the report of Wolfowitz's remarks because they feared it would undermine public support for the war. In Europe, the account of Wolfowitz's remarks revived suspicions that the administration had deliberately misled the world about Iraq. Meanwhile, Bush was headed to Poland, Russia and an economic summit meeting in France. ``The charge of deception is inescapable,'' said Germany's largest newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

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240,000 Cluster Bombs Were Dropped on Iraq

'Dumb' bombs used to topple Saddam
By Mark Forbes
Defence Correspondent
Canberra
June 3 2003

A third of the bombs dropped on Iraq were old-style "dumb weapons" - despite suggestions from the Pentagon that 90 per cent of munitions used would be precision-guided.

The first detailed analysis of the coalition air campaign by the commander of US air forces, Michael Moseley, also reveals a heavy emphasis on psychological operations; 32 million pro-coalition leaflets rained down on Iraqis during the campaign and 610 hours of anti-Saddam Hussein propaganda were broadcast.

There were 10 authorised strikes against "media facilities", including the Baghdad office of the Arabic TV news channel al-Jazeera, in which a reporter died.

More than 240,000 cluster bombs were dropped on Iraq, the report shows. Australia refuses to use these weapons, which were said by doctors to have caused injuries to children during allied bombing raids.

Humanitarian organisations want cluster bombs banned because their hundreds of grenade-like explosives scatter as far as half a kilometre, sometimes over urban areas where they can lie undisturbed for years and then explode. During the war, Central Command in Qatar began investigating reports that cluster bombs had killed 11 civilians in Hillah, in southern Iraq, and admitted in April that, while aiming for Iraqi missile systems and artillery, it hit Baghdad suburbs with cluster bombs.

Commander Moseley's assessment of the campaign is based on military records from March 19 to April 18. Called Operation Iraqi Freedom - By The Numbers, it has not been publicly released but is available to military experts. An unclassified version has been obtained by The Age.

Retired Air Vice-Marshal Peter Nicholson said it showed a much higher proportion of precision-guided munitions were fired at the beginning of the campaign but, as the war progressed, fewer advanced weapons were used.

He criticised the number of Tomahawk missiles, each costing more than $1.5 million, used by the US. "They fired far too many Tomahawks just because it kept the US Navy in play," he said. "They could have done the same thing with bombs from aircraft at a twentieth of the cost."

A total of 467,000 military personnel were deployed to fight Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2050 of them were Australian. Australia flew 565 out of 41,000 coalition missions, with 302 of those combat sorties. Airpower expert at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Aldo Borgu, said the report confirms that Australia's contribution was minor.

He said the report highlighted the incompetence of Iraqi air defences, which fired 1600 missiles, many more than originally thought, but failed to hit one coalition aircraft. One low-flying Warthog and six attack helicopters were downed by enemy ground fire. Thirteen allied aircraft were lost to mishaps, errors and equipment failures.

An allied plus could have been a successful propaganda campaign given that, "on the whole, the Iraqi military did not fight", Mr Borgu said.

According to Commander Moseley's report, 81 different leaflets were printed and 108 radio messages sent. Coalition aircraft over Iraq broadcast 304 hours of television.

Nearly 160 "leaflet missions" dropped 31.8 million leaflets. Commander Moseley notes that the paper could have made 120,000 toilet rolls. Some told Iraqi troops to surrender and avoid death. They were told to drape white flags on their tanks and military vehicles, move away from them, throw down their weapons and wait for allied forces to round them up.

"The US and its allies want the Iraqi people to be liberated from Saddam's injustice and for Iraq to become a respected member of the international community," one said. "Iraq's future depends on you."

Mr Borgu said the information provided by the report was far more detailed than anything released by the Australian military and would help in a real evaluation of the campaign.

A higher percentage of unguided munitions than expected had been dropped - nearly 10,000 as against nearly 20,000 precision bombs and missiles - but the proportion of smart weapons was still more than double that used in Kosovo and six times that used in the first Gulf War. It was a new trend in warfare, he said.

About half the precision guided munitions were laser-guided bombs and more than 800 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched at Iraq.

More than half the targets selected for air strikes were Iraqi army or Republican Guard units, but about one in 10 bombs were dropped on possible weapons of mass destruction or missile sites.

Attacks on the Iraqi leadership were designated "time sensitive", and coalition aircraft made at least 50 strikes against elements of the leadership, including Saddam Hussein.

The coalition air campaigns search and rescue centre made 55 rescue missions, saving 73 personnel.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/02/1054406130502.html